NSA & Angry Birds

Is The NSA Watching You Play Angry Birds?

Still hooked on Angry Birds? Well it turns out the app might be communicating information about you to external parties — and we don't mean just letting everyone around you know that you have a some free time on your hands and love flinging those colorful birds into those dastardly, cackling pigs.

According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been pulling personal information from several mobile apps — including Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Flickster, and yes, even Angry Birds.

Among the information gleaned from mobile phone apps is the phone's settings, where it connected to, which websites it has visited, documents it has downloaded, who its users' friends were and, most interestingly, the users' political affiliations and sexual orientation.

In one of the documents from 2008, the GCHQ is quoted as saying that the joint spying program "effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system."

In a statement on Monday, the NSA assured the public that they are not interested in the communications of the general public and only in those considered "valid foreign intelligence targets."

We're not sure how many international criminals and spies are whiling away the hours on Angry Birds (maybe Archer) but there are roughly 1.7 billion arguably "average" people hooked up to the app worldwide.

This is yet another revelation toward a full understanding that anything we do online or through our phones is unlikely to be genuinely secure. And unless you're prepared to pull a Ron Swanson and attempt to get off the grid completely, you may just have to accept that the NSA is watching you play Angry Birds.